yay Elite. I'm playing Freelancer that way, only 5000 more victims to go before I hit ELITE. Sometimes when I'm out there, camping the Xenos spawn, I think back to those old Elite days where you'd camp out over enemy military bases, shooting down all the little ships undocking for as many kills as possible before they finally ran you off.

Re: getting Privateer to run...

DOS boot disk. Just make sure you have all the drivers, and you set you extended memory manager correctly, and your sound card and all that lovely DOS stuff!

As for the joystick issue: unplug your joystick before you start the game, it shouldn't ask you to calibrate it then.

--LW

I did have the joystick unplugged. It still asks me.

My first PC game was WC2, being an Elite fan (on the bbc computer) I couldn't wait to get hold of this colour game.

I remember spending ages loading all the 25 (ish) floppies and then waiting ages for them to decompress before installing the game.

Then we had the really cheap joystick (sorry to mention joysticks here) and the vga colour. I remember going home from work at lunch time to collect the newly arrived speech pack (we had to make a backup and that was asier at work!).

Ah... Privateer....

my proudest moment in that game was outfitting my Orion with the lv 6 shield upgrade, then took it out and afterburned into an asteroid and the shields didn't give out!

ah.simple.joys.

I bought WC2 about a year ago. Having been out for quite a while, it was only $1.50. It's the newest update of it, so it's got the speech pack included and runs from a CD-ROM. Thing is, it won't run. I try to and it gets to a certain point and crashes. It gives me the opening sequence, but there is NO sound and the animation FLIES. I don't know what's up with it. I gave up on it because, since it's such an old game, there's really no support for it from any official authoritative figure. If I can find it around here somewhere, I'll give it another go and come back to see if there's any way ya'll might be able to help me. I'll post it in a new topic in the off-topic forum. If anyone's interested. I would really like to get a taste for the beginning of the Kilrathi Saga.

"That's the rock where I see the leprechaun. He tells me to burn things." - Ralph Wiggum

Privateer was one of my favorite space combat games. I had to have two separate games though. Those merchant vessals were just too tempting sitting there all "plump for the picking."

Only recent game that's "open ended" was Derek Smart's Battlecruiser Millenium . While the game had promise, it was way too buggy and tried to do too much IMHO.

"The price of freedom is eternal vigilance..."

Oh Elite - docking

Pretty bad unless you got the docking computer )

And somehow I missed the Privateers - after all those WCs, and X-Fighters - when I finally got wind of Privateer it was so dead I couldn´t get it anymore anywhere - and then the looong wait for Fl started - well worth it IMO.

Klaus

Ahhh yess... and the mother of all lasers ....


brings a tear to my eye


Thanx "Gunnery Sergeant Mark "Thorndog" Thornton"

Great post

The Xenos remind me a little of the Retros from Privateer.

Dave

Here is what I use to run Privateer w/ Righteous Fire on my AMD 1800 with Win98se.

In my Config.sys I have.....

Device=C:\WINDOWS\Himem.Sys
Devicehigh=C:\windows\emm386.exe ram 16384 I=b000-b7ff
DOS=HIGH,UMB
buffers=40
files=40

And my Autoexec has....

SET PATH=C:\WINDOWS;C:\WINDOWS\COMMAND
LH C:\mouse\mouse.com
set sound=C:\Viaudio
set blaster=a220 i5 d1 p330 j201
LH C:\Viaudio\viafmtsr.com

The Mouse.com is an old mouse driver for DOS, I downloaded it of the internet, not sure where, but it's only 32k, so I can email it out.
The Viaaudio is my soundcard built into the mobo, which I downloaded the drivers from the internet also. The Viaaudio directory has 4 files which come to 438k, so I can email these out also, but they only work for the Via chipset Mobo's.

The other part you want to look at is the set blaster line, if you remove the j201, your joystick will be diasbled. Once you disable it you will only be able to use the keyboard to control your ship. I would look for an older Microsoft Sidewinder, as they are analog and work in the old DOS games. I purchased my from Software ETC, before the new name of GameStop.

Now what I did was creat a shortcut on my desktop,right click, new shortcut and a new window appears, in the new window click the BROWSE button and goto drive C: and look for COMMAND.COM, it may only be called Command. Then name it Privateer and click finish. Now goto the shortcut you've just created and right click it, goto properties, the goto the PROGRAM tab, and select the ADVANCED button at the bottom. Put a check mark in the MS-DOS mode box, remove the check from the WARN before entering MS-DOS mode, and copy the above settings into their respective areas. Click OK twice and your done.

Now you need to install the game to a directory. I put mine in C:\Privateer, I also did this while in Windows. I then copied the PRIV.TRE and RF.TRE files into the Privateer directory from my CD-Rom. Once that was done I went into the Privateer directory and found the files called PRIV.CFG AND RF.CFG. Open them up with note pad and you will see something like this =d:rf.tre or =d:priv.tre. Edit them to =c:rf.tre and =c:priv.tre, what that will do is make the game look for the games files on your HDD instaed of your CD-Rom. If you don't have the RF.TRE don't worry, it just means you don't have the Righteous Fire expansion.

Now to test it out, double click the Privateer icon and your computer should start to reboot, but it will only follow the above information, ie. config.sys and autoexec.bat information above. Once in dos mode change to your Privateer directory and type Priv and hit enter, the game should start to run, if not then check the settings above and make sure you have those files. The mouse.com file I have in a directory on the C drive I called mouse, that's why I have it like this..."LH C:\mouse\mouse.com", the LH is just a shortway to say LoadHigh for DOS instructions. The "set sound=C:\Viaudio", is the same, I have a directory called Viaudio on my C drive. So when it come to the last line in the autoexec......"LH C:\Viaudio\viafmtsr.com", it looks in my Viaudio directory for the file called viafmtsr.com.
Now if you have all of the settings, files, and folders correctly listed but the game doesn't run, or doesn't have sound, check your BIOS, in there you should see a setting for Legacy sound, make sure it's enabled and that the settings for the card are the same as above .....a220 i5 d1 p330 j201, again if you don't have a joystick remove the j201.

If for some other reason you can't get it to work just post here and I'll be happy to help in any way.

PS-I do NOT use anything to slow down the speed of my processor and the game runs just like it did back in the old, eh, good old days.

John

I don't remember if I knew about Privateer before it came out or not. I'm not even sure I remember installing it. I do remember playing it, though. In fact my brother and I found that we could play together with me as a pilot and him as a navigator/radar operator. Basically, I had the joystick and he had the keyboard. How's that for intuitive co-op play?

After Priv 2 (which wasn't quite on the level of the first) I was dismayed...I couldn't find any other decent free-form games like that. Imagine my suprise when I heard about FreeLancer..and that it was designed by the creators of Wing Commander...tomorrow won't come quickly enough

Anyone ever play X-beyond the frontier or the WAY better sequel X-tension?

Combat wasn't as nice as FL but building factories and asteroid mining were fun.

I liked putting other trade routes out of business by selling the same goods at a loss just to take over the market!

It was also cool how you could have a fleet of fighters, freighters, and a cap ship, all running around on autopilot. They could trade goods, protect your factories, and explore for you.

Some parts are similar to FL, like different styles of ships and stations for each major race, highly customizable ships, and lots of places to go.

John, thanks for the great tips. I'm going to try that. I was planning on stopping by best buy and pick up an analog joystick. I'll let you know if i get it working. Thanks again. I appreciate it.